So like every other unoriginal person out there, I decided I wanted to buy Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” after seeing the movie “Julie and Julia.” While I found Julie to be almost unbearable, Meryl Streep made Julia Child look lovable and cooking her way seemed to be joyous in a way that “Joy of Cooking” cooking never has been for me. Child put so much of herself into her food and her ground-breaking cookbook that I was sure it was going to be just the thing to inspire my own inner chef.
I’m not a terribly hopeless cook like my sweet mother is, and in fact it is my mother’s lack of culinary ability that inspired me to learn to cook in the first place. Though I found my steady diet of microwave French toast, deli sandwiches, and mac and cheese just dandy, I was always surprised when I would go to a friend’s house and see that their moms made pancakes for breakfast and sometimes would start preparing dinner right after lunchtime. LUNCHTIME! How long could something possibly sit in the microwave? When I was 14 and eating at my friend Shannon’s grandparents’ house, her grandma asked me if I liked pork chops and I told her I didn’t know because I had never tried them. Everyone looked at me like I had just told them I preferred to eat babies for dinner. It was then that I decided I would learn to cook so that my future children would not receive similar horrified looks when they ate at friends’ houses.
My attempts at cooking have generally gone pretty well. I feel confident in my ability to make a good lasagna, my parents love how I cook salmon and asparagus, and for three years in a row now I’ve made Thanksgiving dinner by myself. But Julia Child’s boeuf bourginon was certainly my loftiest endeavor to date.
Apparently it’s the first dish from her then-manuscript that the publisher tried to cook and was the recipe that made the publisher realize what a special and unique cookbook it truly was and prompted her to offer Julia and her comrades a book deal. It’s also the dish that Julie Powell ruins in the movie…and I would assume real life, but seeing as how I found her so irritating in the film, I couldn’t bear the thought of reading her book and/or blog. Blogs are just so self-indulgent.
I had to go to three stores to buy all the ingredients and dropped a pretty serious chunk of change doing so. I went to the butcher counter to get a six-ounce SLAB of bacon with the rind on. Prior to reading the recipe, I didn’t know you could purchase bacon by the slab, or that it had a rind, but rest assured you can, and it does. I sliced onions until my eyes stung and at one point had three of my four burners AND my oven going all at once. I was wearing an apron that was covered in flour and tapping a wooden spoon against the cookbook absent-mindedly while consulting the recipe for the 18th time. I was cooking!
Now I would never call myself any kind of authority on cooking whatsoever, but in my limited experience, I’ve never connected with what I was doing and saw myself on a path to an outcome like I did with my first Julia Child recipe. Usually I feel like I am blindly following random instructions in the vain hope that when I’m done there will be food. My dad likes to say “that’s not cooking; that’s reading.” But this time it really felt like cooking and I’ve never been more proud of something I’ve made.
Up until a few days ago, I really thought Julia Child was just a tall lady with a funny voice who people happened to trust with their dinners, and when the post-script of the movie claimed that her book “changed the world” I rolled my eyes. But if I can happily spend 3+ hours in the kitchen, feeling confident that I am doing everything right, and have something delicious at the end, my world is definitely better.